lepers in Oriental countries are compelled to cry aloud upon the approach of strangers their accursed isolation from the rest of mankind, a half-century would have sufficed to obliterate from the minds of men the facts that slavery once prevailed in the Republic, and that the slaves were now free men and citizens, equal under the Constitution and before the laws and the other citizens of the country; but the mark of color remains and makes its possessor a social pariah, to be robbed, beaten and lynched,—and a political nondescript, who has got his own salvation to work out, of equality before the laws, with almost the entire white population of the country arrayed against him.
Surely, no race of people ever had a larger job on their hands than have the colored citizens of the United States. The older they grow, the larger the job will become; so that fifty years hence, it will be to this government all that the Irish question is to-day to the government of Great Britain, and perhaps more. Read by the light of history, the signs of the times, since the close of the Civil War, all point unerringly to the conclusion here reached. There are those, I am mindful, learned in the wisdom of age and experience, who regard this view of the situation as that of an alarmist; but, as Patrick Henry declared, "I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided," and that is the history of the vicissitudes of other races, whose condition was not unlike, in many respects, the condition of the colored citizens of this Republic. Already we are in the fury and heat of the conflict, but thousands of us do not know it, or, knowing, take no heed of the awful fact, and will continue to nurse the ignorance Alexander Pope declared to be bliss, until aroused by some shock which shall destroy, once for all, the citadel where we have harbored our sublime confidence.
It is here that the relations the negro Press sustains to the negro problem, are thrown out as clearly as the sun in the
